It is a great personal pleasure for me to address this conference,
honoring the life and work of Alexander Romanovich Luria. I am not a
Russian and I am acutely aware that I am speaking to you, so to speak,
from afar, about a person you know very differently than I do. So, to
begin with, I want to give a brief account of how I first encountered
Alexander Romanovich and his work. I will then provide my
interpretation of his contributions to psychology, in particular, the
issue of creating a unified science of psychology.

Some Personal Background

I first came to Moscow with my wife 35 years ago, as a brand new
post-doctoral student. I had obtained my degree one month earlier,
specializing in a branch of American learning theory called
"mathematical learning theory. I came because I had read an article by
Alexander Romanovich and Olga Sergeevna Vinogradova about semantic
reflexes. Reflexes were the basic units of analysis that underpinned
the kind of learning theory that I was brought up on. The lineage went
from Pavlov to Skinner to Estes, my graduate advisor. I had never taken
a class in human development, but I had studied psychoacoustics and
learning situations designed in terms of a basically Skinnerian
framework. I had never heard of cultural psychology or the crisis in
psychology.

Today I stand here with a lot less hair on my head and a lot different
kinds of thoughts in my head. I cannot attribute the loss of hair to
Alexander Romanovich. But without a doubt, the kinds of thoughts in my
head were set on a radically different path by my experiences in
Moscow.

I say all of this because it is important that you understand the
starting point from which I entered into interaction with Soviet-then-
Russian psychology. I was an alien from the "other paradigm of
psychology." I was treated very politely, and incorporated into
Alexander Romanovich's collective at the Bourdenko Institute. Evgenia
Davydovna Khomskaya supervised a joint study of the development of
semantic reflexes in people with different kinds of brain lesions. I
spent several months working with Evgenii Nikolaivitch Sokolov and Olga
Vinogradova on orienting reflexes in rabbits and his then-student Nina
Korzh on signal detection and memory among normal adults. I spent a
month working with Boris Pokovich, Joseph Pressman, and Maria Varga in
Asratyan's Institute of Nervous Activity. I visited Leningrad and saw
the work of Chistovich and colleagues at the Pavlov Institute at
Koltushi.

I came home having learned at lot more about Soviet reality than about
Soviet psychology, but I also came home with a great admiration for
Alexander Romanovich, and a feeling of obligation for the incredible
amount of work he did to make our stay a productive and humane one.

My understanding of Soviet Psychology, such as it is, grew very
slowly. Following my return from Moscow, I began editing a volume of
essays from the 1959 Handbook of Soviet Psychology. This task
was carried out on Alexander Romanovich's initiative. The resulting
book is a watered down version of the Soviet original, filtered through
a process of selection and deletion that depended primarily on my
judgment about which chapters might possibly make sense to my American
colleagues. Shortly thereafter, I became editor of the translation
journal, Soviet Psychology, a chore I fulfilled for the past 29
years.

You might think that all this exposure to Soviet psychology would have
provided me with a pretty good understanding of its basic principles.
Nichevo podobnova! [Nothing of the sort!]. I tried as best I could,
given the conditions of communication between the USSR and the USA, to
understand the debates I encountered in Soviet journals. But I found
the arguments difficult to follow, and they often seemed more like
local battles fought in the medium of ideological discourse. I could
not use them as instruments to think with.

The event that began my serious engagement with Luria's ideas began in
a serious way came when I was sent to investigate the barriers faced by
rural Liberian children who experienced great difficulty in learning
the forms of mathematics that are part of the elementary school
curriculum in Moscow and San Diego. My focus, reflecting the
methodological background from which I came, was on creating a
methodology that would make cross-cultural psychology a respectable
discipline, based on sound scientific principles.

I did not approach the task of cross-cultural research in a
sophisticated way. I simply assumed that people would develop high
levels skills in those domains of life that demanded that they do so.
Consequently, I adopted an interdisciplinary methodology which sought
to identify the occurrence of everyday local activities mediated by
mathematics and to figure out how they were patterned as a part of the
social heritage of the group, called culture. The applied goal of this
work was to reorganize instruction to take account of local knowledge.

This line of approach led quickly to an apparent contradiction. From an
analysis of test scores in cross-cultural experiments, it seemed
evident that "primitives think like children." Both scored poorly. But
any reasonably informed ethnographic account of the complexities of
everyday social interactions and activities (and my own personal
observations) indicated that only highly intelligent, culturally
knowledgeable, persons could deal with the complexities of everyday
existence. Psychological test data seemed clearly in conflict with my
everyday interactions with the people who were subjects of my
experiments. The great ease with which they outwitted me stood in sharp
contrast to their "child-like behavior" in my experiments. In addition,
my colleagues and I found that when we modified our experimental
procedures, people's performance was also modified. Repeatedly we
demonstrated that what others took to be universal cultural
achievements that were attained to a lesser degree, were in fact
intimately related to the distortions of reality introduced by
experimental procedures. It was this paradox that led me back to
Alexander Romanovich, and through him, to Lev Vygotsky and Alexei
Leontiev. I had discovered one modern manifestation of the "crisis in
psychology," but I did not know this at the time.

In the summer of 1966 I returned to Moscow with my wife and baby
daughter. I had made a bargain with Alexander Romanovich: If he would
spend an hour a day explaining his research in Central Asia to me, I
would work 7 hours a day to help organize for the International
Congress of Psychology. The Congress is a blur in my memory. But I
clearly remember our discussions about issues of methodology and theory
with Alexander Romanovich several days a week. Each morning we went
over his old data and he tried to explain to me how his data followed
from a very general theoretical position that was articulated by Lev
Vygotsky in the middle of the 1920's.

Two years later, I was able to begin to apply what I had learned
because I received a grant from the US National Science foundation to
follow up on our earlier cross-cultural work. I was able to create an
American, 1970's version of Luria and Vygotsky's research in Central
Asia, but with people from rural Liberia as a new "test case." I often
found it difficult to reconcile their ideas about the way that
socio-economic-cultural transformations lead to a new form of thought,
"theoretical" thinking modeled on normative literate practices of
industrialized countries with evidence from my own research and that of
many others that even non-literate people think "theoretically" in
cultural practices where it is required by circumstances, and even
highly educated people do not think theoretically outside of a
restricted range of cultural practices.

It is important to my story to realize that the book we published on
The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking in 1971 contained
only one reference to Vygotsky. It came at the beginning of a chapter
on classification and focused on the Vygotsky-Sakharov procedure. The
theoretical underpinnings of the procedure were not discussed. Rather,
a superficial interpretation of the experiment linked it to American
studies of concept formation.

At this point, in the early 1970's, the "theoretical side" of my
lessons in cultural-historical psychology began to improve because
Luria and his friend, the American publisher, Arthur Rosenthal, used me
as an intermediary in the publication of a series of books which
included essays by Vygotsky and Luria's autobiography. As "designated
editor" of these volumes, I was forced to go back and read the sources
to which Vygotsky and Luria referred in their writings.

Initially I had great difficulty understanding their focus on
psychologists who lived around the turn of the century. I did not know
anything about the ideas of people such as Brentano,Hoffding, Dilthey,
Rickert, or Windelband. Wundt ideas about a volkerpsikhologie
were temporarily forgotten by the dominant paradigm of
methodological behaviorism. Dilthey's search for a reale Psichologie
simply not a part of my intellectual training. So, I spent a long
time reading the work of people completely foreign to my own training.

There, in a capsule, is the starting point for judging what I say in
the remainder of this talk. It is my view of a part of your history. It
is a view reflected through anther national tradition, and it is likely
to seem wrong, or at least not insufficiently subtle to you.

The current interpretation of Luria in Europe and the United
States

In the United States, and perhaps in Russia too, Luria is honored as a
founder of neuropsychology, a major subdiscipline within psychology.
His ideas about the functional organization of brain systems remain
influential in many fields of medicine and defectology, as well as the
new discipline of cognitive science. Many talks at this conference on
Luria the neuropsychologist certainly attest to his continuing
international influence in this area despite the great advances in
brain imaging techniques that have so enriched neuropsychology in the
past two decades.

The drama of the mnemonist and the brain injured patient became very
well known in the United States. But they were treated as oddities,
tours de force. Few American readers took seriously the theoretically
motivated foundations of Luria's writings. They did not know the
history of research, begun in the 1920's that led to these "sudden
innovations" in the 1950's and 1960's . Although they were translated
and affected experts, books such as Traumatic Aphasia were not
linked to Luria's work in the 1920's and early 1930/s when he and his
colleagues were struggling to formulate a comprehensive new approach to
psychology. The theory underpinning studies with children, with the
brain injured, and the mentally retarded, was not seen as a unified
whole. Rather each line of research was interpreted as a set of
relatively unconnected studies of unusual interest.

I see things differently. My key thesis is that from the earliest days
of his career, well before he met Vygotsky, Luria was working to solve
the crisis in psychology-- and that he succeeded.

The Crisis in Psychology

In seeking to understand the full scope of Luria's contributions to
psychology it is important to take seriously the fact that Alexander
Romanovich began his career at a time when modern psychology was just
beginning to take shape. Experimental approaches to psychological
processes were in the ascendancy, but there were those who opposed the
idea that psychology could be or should be, a "positive" science, in
the model of methodological behaviorism. The opponents of the dominant
paradigm were themselves divided by a series of interlocking disputes
about what kind of science psychology could be.

Should it be an experimental science, modeled on the natural sciences,
or a descriptive science, modeled on history and the humane sciences?

Were psychological laws restricted to "nomothetic" generalizations
applying only to populations do they include "idiographic" laws that
could illuminate the causal dynamics of individual human minds?

Is it necessary to choose between subjective and objective approaches
to research?

Should psychology to be restricted to a laboratory science, or could it
be expanded to apply to people's everyday lives and serve as a basis
for promoting social progress?

It is this set of issues, that was being widely debated in psychology
in the early decades of this century, that Vygotsky analyzed in his
monograph on the crisis in psychology. As van der Veer and Valsiner
(1991) remark in their comprehensive monograph, it is not clear whether
Vygotsky ever Vygotsky resolved the crisis, even in his own terms.
Vygotsky, you will recall, wrote that in so far as the two kinds of
psychology can be reconciled, unification would come about through
uniting theory with practice:

The most complex contradictions of psychology's methodology are brought
to the field of practice and can only be resolved there. Here the
dispute stops being sterile, it comes to an end... That is why practice
transforms the whole of scientific methodology (Quoted in van der Veer
& Valsiner, 1991, p. 150).[1]

Vygotsky criticized eclectic, a-theoretical approaches to practice,
arguing instead for a principled methodology of theory-driven practice
that he called "psychotechnics." Luria also argued for a psychology
built on theory-driven practice. Early in his life, the combined motor
method provided one methodology. Later in life he evolved a new
methodology he called Romantic Science. Both were solutions to the
crisis in psychology.

The combined motor method

By the testimony of his autobiography and his early published writings,
Alexander Romanovich was interested in the issues that made up the
crisis in psychology for several years before he met Vygotsky. While
still a student he read widely in German and American psychology. He
was very sympathetic to German act-psychology and at the same time he
was fascinated by Freud and Jung. This combination may seem odd, but
it reflected his search for a theory of motivation and some way to
address questions of emotional conflicts and the method of free
associations. As he summarized his notions about psychoanalysis:

Here, I thought, was a scientific approach that combined a strongly
deterministic explanation of concrete, individual behavior with an
explanation of the origins of complex human needs in terms of natural
science. Perhaps psychoanalysis could serve as the basis for a
scientific reale Psichologie, one that could overcome the
nomothetic-idiographic distinction (1979, p. 23)

In emulation of the psychoanalytical writers, he conducted clinical
research on free associations, but he mistrusted the results of such
efforts, feeling that any conclusions he tried to reach about the flow
of his subjects' thoughts were insufficiently grounded. As he wrote in
his autobiography, " While I was able to fill notebooks with [a
patient's] free associations, I was in no position to carry out my plan
to use such data to capture `the concrete reality of the flow of ideas
(1979, p.24").

In response to this dissatisfaction he created a methodology designed
to embody a psychodynamic theory of mind in an objective set of
laboratory procedures. The centerpiece of this methodology was an
experimental technique that he called the combined motor method, which,
he hoped, would provide a way of rendering Freud's clinical methods
accessible to experimental treatment.

The fullest existing description of this work is contained in a
monograph published in English in 1932 under the title The Nature of
Human Conflicts: Or Emotion, Conflict and Will. Unfortunately, this
fascinating book is not yet available in Russian; rather Russian papers
describing this experiment provided only a partial glimpse of the
overall project. The book also provides a window on how Luria's early
work was taken up and transformed under the influence of Vygotsky, and
why Vygotsky would find in Luria such a useful colleague.

In the first chapter Luria outlines his basic presuppositions and his
experimental strategy. He explicitly rejects mechanical determinism,
declaring "The structure of the organism presupposes not an accidental
mosaic, but a complex organization of separate systems . . . [that]
unite as very definite parts into an integrated functional structure."
(pp. 6-7)

Since this structure is the consequence of a long complicated
development, both ontogenetically and cultural-historically, and
because the parts are integrated into a whole functional system, how
can it be possible to isolate elements in this system for purposes of
psychological analysis? Phrased differently, since no two people are
constructed alike, how could one possibly obtain valid evidence about
the thought processes of another person?

The answer that Luria provided was that other people's thoughts could
not be observed directly. But they could be revealed
indirectly in so far as they could be reflected in a publicly
displayable, voluntary behavior. He phrased his strategy as follows:

We should on the one hand, produce the central process of the
disorganization of behavior; on the other hand, we should try to
reflect this process in some [other] system accessible and suitable for
examination. The motor function is such a systematic, objectively
reflected structure of the neuro-dynamic processes concealed from
immediate examination. And there lies before us the use of the motor
function as a system of reflected structure of hidden psychological
processes. Thus we proceed along the path we call the combined motor
method. (p. 18)

The first phase in his technique was to induce a well-coordinated,

publicly available behavior as the medium of coordination necessary for
the psychological analysis to be accurate. He used various devices for
this purpose. Often the subject was requested to hold the left hand
steady in a device that could record its movements, while
simultaneously being asked to press a button or squeeze a bulb in
response to verbal stimuli presented by the experimenter. Once this
behavior became stable, the analyst sought to disrupt it selectively in
line with his hypothesis about particular internal psychological
states.

The combined motor method was applied to psychodiagnosis in a wide
variety of real life circumstances consistent with Luria's goal of
demonstrating the possibility of a methodology powerful enough to reach
beyond the laboratory to engage the kinds of long-term emotions which
typically organize human behavior. It also combines general laws with
specific cases. The book is full of examples. When he spoke about this
wrok in later life, Luria ordinarily emphasized studies with suspected
criminals because they were the basis for lie detector tests. But the
book also contains a variety of purely experimental, non-applied
verifications of his methodology. For example, he conducted experiments
with normal adults who were first told various stories, and then
hypnotized to suppress knowledge of certain words, following which the
analyst had to ferret out the "hidden" words from the ways in which
their motor behavior was selectively disrupted. He also conducted
experiments with people suffering various neuroses and brain damage as
a means of further verifying the effectiveness of his methods.

Work on the combined motor method is concentrated in the first two
sections of The Nature of Human Conflicts which was published in
1932 in English, but contains a record of research from 1923-1930. I
find the book fascinating reading in part because I know that at the
start of this period, Alexander Romanovich was intent upon creating the
combined motor method as a model system for the study of the
psychodynamics of individual thought. In doing so, he had achieved one
model for resolving the crisis in psychology. By the end of this
period, he was engaged with Vygotsky and Leontiev (who had participated
in some of the early experiments on The combined motor method) in
creating a new school of psychology founded on The principle that the
mind is mediated through culture. From this perspective, the combined
motor method sets up a mini "cultural system" and it is within the
confines of this microcosm that one can study how culture serves as the
medium of propagating ideas from one person to another. As Luria
expressed this relationship at The end of The Nature of Human
Conflicts, " The analysis of complex cultural mechanisms is the key
to the understanding of the simple neurodynamical processes 1932, p.
428).

One sees many variations on this method in Luria's later work such as
his studies on the development of self control in normal and abnormal
children; unfortunately, this work was carried out at a time when it
was required to communicate in terms that sounded like Pavlovian
theory, so the continuity between the early and later work is difficult
to notice, or at least, it was for me.

Luria's Romantic Science

I do not desire to rehearse with
you the many transformations that Alexander Romanovich and his whole
generation underwent in the half century between the writing of The
Nature of Human Conflicts and the publication of his autobiography.
As chronicled in his autobiography, Alexander Romanovich worked in many
areas of psychology, completed medical school, worked through the war
as a neuropsychologist-therapist, went on to do basic research in the
neurophysiology of brain functions, and wrote two small books
chronicling long term case studies that he had carried out with two
remarkable men.

Luria (1979) begins his autobiography with a discussion of the science
of psychology he inherited, and how he had, from his earliest research,
sought a way to combine the two psychologies, one experimental/
generalizing, one descriptive/ particularizing. He concludes his
narrative by proposing a particular way of combining he two
psychologies in practice-- by applying them to the life circumstances
of an actual person. He called this approach Romantic Science which he
contrasted with Classical Science.

Classical scholars are those who look upon events in terms of their
constituent parts. Step by step they single out important units and
elements until they can formulate abstract, general laws.... Romantic
scholars' traits, attitudes, and strategies are just the opposite. They
do not follow the path of reductionism, which is the leading philosophy
of the classical group. Romantics in science want neither to split
living reality into its elementary components nor to represent the
wealth of life's concrete events as abstract models that lose the
properties of the phenomena themselves. (p. 174).

In writing about Romantic Science, Luria quoted a line from Goethe's
Faust in which Mephistopheles tells the eager student, "Grey is
every theory, ever green the tree of life," expressing his scepticism
for the golden promises of theory. While editing Luria's
autobiography, I read Faust to see what other insights into
Luria's ideas I could discover there. One such passage struck me
forcefully for its power to contrast the two sciences whose
interactions have been a major topic of this book. The passage occurs
elsewhere in the same act from the play. Mephistopheles advises an
eager student on his future career, describing the consequences of
following the path of science.

The conversation begins with Mephistopheles admiring the work of
weavers, who create patterns, a process in which "A single treadle
governs many a thread, And at a stroke a thousand strands are wed."
Quite different is the scientists' approach, and quite different the
result. In light of my discussion to this point, it would not be amiss
to think of the scientist as a psychologist who pursues experimental,
causal, explanatory, psychology and a weaver who follows the path of
cultural-historical, observational-clinical, descriptive psychology.

And so philosophers step in

To weave a proof that things begin,

Past question, with an origin.

With first and second well rehearsed,

Our third and forth can be deduced.

And if no second were or first,

No third or fourth could be produced.

As weavers though, they don't amount to much.

To docket living things past any doubt

You cancel first The living spirit out;

The parts lie in The hollow of your hand,

You only lack the living link you banned.

(Goethe, 1988, p.95)

Here we encounter yet another formulation of the basic issue underlying
the crisis in psychology; two different logics of inquiry. Goethe
highlights precisely the issue that Alexander Romanovich sought to
resolve by formulating an approach that made the two methodologies
moments in, parts of, a methodology that combines theory and practice
through deep involvement in the lives of individuals over time. The
important idea that when we are talking about human life processes,
declarations about "firsts," The ultimate causes from which
consequences flow, must always be suspect. This criticism is at the
heart of Dewey's century-old criticism of the reflex theory of
thinking. It is a position expressed in different ways by philosophers
as apparently diverse as Bakthin, Dewey, and Mead, that "in The
beginning was the act."

For the same reasons, Romantic Science as formulated by Luria does not
allow a simple formulation such as "purposive psychology is concerned
with goal formation, causal psychology is concern with problem
solution." Goal formation, no less than theory and practice, are two
different moments of one and the same psychological act. Analysis must
seek to include both moments and their dynamics.

Luria's fusion of the two different world views, or orders of reality,
is clearly in conformity with Vygotsky's views about the conditions
necessary to overcome the crisis of psychology summarized earlier: it
is the field of the real life circumstances of real human beings which
serves as the anvil on which the improvements in theory must be
tested.

It is their success in bringing together the two ways of knowing that
make Luria's longitudinal case studies significant beyond the fields of
neuropsychology or cognitive psychology, any of the sub-branches of
psychology one cares to name. So, for example, Luria is able to use
his knowledge of the general laws of memory to help Sharashevsky
develop a way to "erase" memories of numbers sets when he was earning
his living as a mnemonist who conducts several shows a night. He
provides the brain-injured Zasetsky with cultural-psychological tools
to re-mediate the way in which his own brain works to that he can read
and write again. Such "helpful hints" were far more than the
idiosyncratic, creative insights of a lucky investigator. They were the
application of general psychological principles to the real lives of
real people. Had he lived to have read them, Vygotsky would almost
certainly have agreed that they represent demonstration proofs that the
crisis in psychology can be overcome.

Generalizing Luria's Approach to Romantic Science

In recent years the best known champion of Romantic Science in the U.S.
has been Oliver Sachs, who will be presenting his ideas to us later in
this meeting. Oliver's deep involvement with his patients over a
period of time is strongly reminiscent of Alexander Romanovich's
approach and adds importantly to The range of abnormal brain-behavior
relationships we can use to develop a more powerful theory of mind.
According to Sachs, central to Romantic Science is that it treats
analytic science and the synthetic biography of the individual case as
essentially complementary, "The dream of a novelist and a scientist
combined" (Sachs, 1987. p. xii). Equally important in my view is the
fact that both Luria and Sachs are therapists who engaged their
patients as human beings over long periods of time and attempted to
demonstrate through practical amelioration of suffering the truth of
the basic premisses of their theories.

My own involvement in Romantic Science represents a generalization of
Luria's views that retains a focus on individuals, but more directly
addresses connections between individual human development and
cultural-historical development.

A number of years ago I began to engage in work with children in
afterschool clubs. There are many reasons for this choice, among them
the fact that the United States is undergoing a crisis in the
afterschool care of children associated with a swelling number of
mothers with small children who must work and no existing national or
regional system of afterschool care. But also important is the fact
that by escaping the clutches of the school and entering onto the
ground ordinarily inhabited by "The community" I could mix leading
activities in ways that might just increase the prevalence of genuine
developmental activity.

Some of the children we work with experience difficulty in school,
others do not. Some come from homes where English is not spoken and
educational experience of parents is limited. Others are said to be
hyperactive or to suffer learning disabilities. I described the early
stages of this work in an article on culture and development that was
published last year in Voprosi Psikhologii. There I presented an
example of a specially organized reading activity for elementary school
children which engaged several children, a teacher, and a teacher's
aide. The procedure is a direct generalization of the combined motor
method and at the same time, it creates a zone of proximal development
for children's reading development.

In the course of doing that work, my colleagues and I began to
experiment with the use of microcomputers as tools for creating
educational activities for children. Subsequently, the success of that
effort has resulted in a situation where I not only study the creation
of alternative activity systems for diagnosing and re-mediating reading
difficulties, but study the development of children over time while, at
the same time, studying the development of the activity systems
themselves. Our research has shown that every such system quickly
constructs an "idioculture" that gives it a distinct form of being and
has distinctive kinds of impacts on its participants. This approach to
experimenting through the design of activity systems allows us to add a
cultural-historical dimension to the romantic science methodology,
while retaining the power to create "unimagined portraits" of both the
children and the cultural-historically constituted activity systems of
which they are a part.

For more than a decade, now, the afterschool activity systems we have
created have proven a fascinating medium for my generalization of
romantic science. They have proven so beneficial to university
students who participate in them, as well as to the community's
children, that our approach has been adopted by all branches of the
University of California, several Universities in Mexico, Sweden, and
elsewhere. So I can safely report that in at least one of its guises,
Romantic Science is alive and well in many parts of the world.

Alexander Romanovich ends his autobiography by commenting that the only
"imaginary portrait" that remained for him to write about was himself,
but that such a book would be different than all The others because

There is no subject with exceptional abilities - I have none. Nor is
there a specific capacity or a specific disaster.... People come and
go, but The creative sources of great historical events and The
important ideas and deeds remain (187-188).

I want to dispute this description. Alexander Romanovich had several
exceptional abilities and specific capacities and he experienced a
series of specific disasters, along with his whole generation. His
special talents were the ability to combine an inquisitive and
all-embracing scientific mind with a deep intuition about how to know
another persons thoughts and feelings. He was an internationalist in
science at a time and in ways that put him at risk. He was a model
scientific mentor, giving of his time for tasks that were certain to be
unrewarded. He created a laboratory within which people did not have to
be afraid to interact a foreigner in a society where such fear was
normal. And he successful planted his ideas so that they survived at
least one journey of many years over many countries, to grow again in
North America.

I may have come to Moscow in 1962 a methodological behaviorist. But I
return here today, thanks to Alexander Romanovich, a
cultural-historical activity theorist.... for better and for worse.